Church 'will be dead in 40 years time

With attendances falling faster than ever, a new report sees the future for Christianity in Britain as bleak By Hazel Southam 16 April 2000 Holy Week has begun with an expert prediction that the Christian church in this country will be dead and buried within 40 years. It will vanish from the mainstream of British life, with only 0.5 per cent of the population attending the Sunday services of any denomination, according to the country's leading church analyst. Historic buildings will be left to crumble in neglect, as congregations vanish and the church infrastructures collapse without money from the parishes. All claims that Britain is a Christian nation will finally have to be given up, says the church attendance specialist, Peter Brierley. "The basic doctrines of Christianity will be believed much less and there will be many who actively do not believe them," he says in a new book to be published this week. The dwindling band of worshippers has grown used to gloomy predictions, but these are the worst yet. Church attendance will be "at an all-time low" in 40 years' time, says Steps to the Future, published by the Scripture Union. Around 40 per cent of the population will have some kind of belief, though a third of them will practise non-Christian religions. Inner-city churches will face the worst decline, closing or running midweek services to keep anyone coming in at all. "This is very sober stuff," says Dr Brierley, best known for compiling the annual Church Attendance Survey. "Numbers of Christians will decrease, and the ones who remain won't express their Christianity by going to church." The statistics could spell disaster for England's 10,000 listed Anglican churches."The last thing we want to see is listed buildings being knocked down, but at some stage, because of dwindling congregations, the Church of England won't be able to maintain them." To date, cathedrals have shown more ability to survive, drawing bigger congregations in recent years thanks to prestigious one-off services and commemorations. Often, however, this is at the expense of parish churches nearby. Dr Brierley accuses the Church of England of avoiding the issue. It is "afraid that English Heritage will get a law passed" making it compulsory to maintain listed buildings  but he argues that such a law will be absolutely necessary to avoid national treasures being lost. There will be fewer clergy in Britain and websites will be mandatory for any churches that are serious about trying to stay afloat. There will be a boom in "cyberchurch" attendance as the faithful log on to the internet in search of spiritual answers not to be found in their local churches. "If time is short and you can attend a service by pressing a few buttons, then people will do that." Dr Brierley's findings come just five months after the publication of his latest English Church Attendance Survey, an independent study of all denominations. It showed that only 7.5 per cent of the population went to church on Sundays. and that, in the past 10 years  billed by the churches as the "Decade of Evangelism"  church attendance dropped by an "alarming" 22 per cent. The new statistics have brought heated reactions from Britain's churches. The Revd Joel Edwards of the Evangelical Alliance, which represents one million Christians, said: "Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated, yet the current trend does provide us with a serious challenge. "Churches are responsible for the spiritual health of the nation, yet the only medicine coming from some of the churches is a drip-feed of doubt, resulting in a haemorrhaging of 2,000 people per week." Previous research by Dr Brierley has shown that the Church of England is very much the worst hit of the Christian denominations, accounting for 40 per cent of the entire fall in attendance over the period from 1989 to 1998. Its Sunday congregations fell from 1,266,300 to 980,600 . The Methodists were the next worst hit, falling from 512,300 to 379,700. In contrast, the Baptists have shown a 2 per cent increase over the period while the evangelical "new" churches gained 38 per cent. Even the Roman Catholic Church declined from 1,715,900 to 1,230,100, but last week spokesman Father Kieron Conry was predicting a change in fortunes. "I do not share this pessimism. Decline started in the 1960s but before then it was in growth, so I'm expecting a change for the better." Jonathan Jennings, spokes-man for the Church of England, agreed it was "clear that the Church struggles with its responsibility in relation to buildings and heritage," but accused Dr Brierley of drawing "foolish conclusions" from his data. The Church of England has recently changed the way it gathers statistics. It argues that worship habits have become more flexible, so that the old method of measuring Sunday attendance leads to an underestimate of the number of people who feel themselves to be part of the Church.

-- Uncle Bob (unclb0b@aol.com), April 15, 2000

Answers

Sounds good to me. If it wasn't so expensive, I'd love to live in England.

-- gilda (jess@listbot.com), April 15, 2000.

Just goes to show 'ya that Religion out of a book, bottle, candle and a television show, ain't gonna cut it anymore.

-- Richard (Astral-Acres@webtv.net), April 15, 2000.

From The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton

...I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being too old to die. Christendom has had the very opposite fate. Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion. This truth is hidden from many by a convention that is too little noticed. Curiously enough, it is a convention of the sort which those who ignore it claim especially to detect and denounce. They are always telling us that priests and ceremonies are not religion and that religious organisation can be a hollow sham, but they hardly realise how true it is. It is so true that three or four times at least in the history of Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and almost every man in his heart expected its end. This fact is only masked in medieval and other times by that very official religion which such critics pride themselves on seeing through. Christianity remained the official religion of a Renaissance prince or the official religion of an eighteenth-century bishop, just as an ancient mythology remained the official religion of Julius Caesar or the Arian creed long remained the official religion of Julian the Apostate. But there was a difference between the cases of Julius and of Julian; because the Church had begun its strange career. There was no reason why men like Julius should not worship gods like Jupiter for ever in public and laugh at them for ever in private. But when Julian treated Christianity as dead, he found it had come to life again. He also found, incidentally, that there was not the faintest sign of Jupiter ever coming to life again. This case of Julian and the episode of Arianism is but the first of a series of examples that can only be roughly indicated here. Arianism, as has been said, had every human appearance of being the natural way in which that particular superstition of Constantine might be expected to peter out. All the ordinary stages had been passed through; the creed had become a respectable thing, had become a ritual thing, had then been modified into a rational thing; and the rationalists were ready to dissipate the last remains of it, just as they do to-day. When Christianity rose again suddenly and threw them, it was almost as unexpected as Christ rising from the dead. But there are many other examples of the same thing, even about the same time. The rush of missionaries from Ireland, For instance, has all the air of an unexpected onslaught of young men on an old world, and even on a Church that showed signs of growing old. Some of them were martyred on the coast of Cornwall; and the chief authority on Cornish antiquities told me that he did not believe for a moment that they were martyred by heathens but (as he expressed it with some humour) 'by rather slack Christians.' ...

-- G. K. Chesterton (gkc@orthodoxy.org), April 15, 2000.

Well, Uncle Bob, Voltaire stated something similar in one of his publications, but within 50 years Bibles were being printed on the same press he had used. So just as that same Bible declares, "Let not him that putteth on his armor boast like him that taketh it off."

And then this quote from the secular level, a little jewel from Vince Lombardi, "It ain't over 'til it's over."

-- (elskon@bigfoot.com), April 15, 2000.

When I was 13, my ninth-grade science teacher told us that by the time we all turned 40 years of age, we would either be walking everywhere or driving electric cars since there was, at most, only 27 years of oil left on the planet. I turned 40 last month.

-- Buster (BustrCollins@aol.com), April 15, 2000.

Nothing new here. The Church of England closes, on average, a church building a week since it does not have enough weekly attendances in many of its churches now to maintain the old buildings which are becoming increasingly expensive to keep up. Less than 4 percent of UK population is churched. The church which has actually gained in the last few years in numbers in England is the Roman Catholic Church, many of them (including over 500 now-former Anglican priests) who left the Church of England in 1991 over the ordination of the first women in the Church of England. Similar hemmoraging has happened here in the Episcopal Church which has lost about 2 million since the early 1960's and stands to lose more soon after its national convention this summer.

And where is the church (and the Anglican Communion) growing? In the Third World. More Christians attend church in Uganda on any given Sunday than do the entire year in the Episcopal Church in the United States. The number of converts coming to Christianity in the Third World is amazing.

But, alas, in the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury sits on a sinking ship. Such is the state of Christianity in England and the UK .......bascially because most folks in the UK are tired of a lot of the the garbage they get from the establishment in the Church of England, the state church. :-(

-- Cradle-born Episcopalian (ConcernedAnglican@canterbury.org), April 15, 2000.